


we lived (in the gaps in the stories)

by akaiiko



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst and Fluff and Smut, Ficlet Collection, M/M, Not Always at the Same Time, Occasionally Dubious Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-06
Updated: 2017-11-06
Packaged: 2019-01-30 03:47:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12645459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akaiiko/pseuds/akaiiko
Summary: There's a 60% chance that this is one of the .15 realities where they fall in love with each other 100% of the time.or:Collection of (mostly) unrelated one shots of less than 1000 words, usually from Tumblr first, but collected here for posterity and ease of access.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by wuffen's [post](https://akaiikowrites.tumblr.com/post/166792997423/wuffen-havent-been-able-to-stop-thinking-about) about Shiro calling Keith "baby".

It starts like this: it’s after finals and the Garrison has gotten quiet with everyone home except for the people who don’t have a home and Keith’s digging through the laundry for a clean shirt. Towards the bottom of the basket there’s a black tee that passes the sniff test so he pulls it on and realizes about seven seconds too late that it’s one of Shiro’s. Because Shiro had taken pity on him last week and done Keith’s laundry with his. The shirt hits the top of his thighs and it’s actually slipping down to show one bony jut of a clavicle. Keith debates whether or not to pull it off and go for another shirt because fuck this is embarrassing when Shiro says, “Keep it on, I like you in my shirt, baby.” Keith yanks the shirt’s hem up to cover his suddenly red face and Shiro’s laughing too sharply sweet.

And it keeps going like this: Shiro’s hands on Keith’s hips as he guides him through a floorwork move in sparring, Shiro’s gunmetal eyes going soft as he ruffles Keith’s hair after a hard sim run, Shiro’s lips curling into that half smile before he presses a reverent kiss to Keith’s shoulder when they’re curled so close that their heartbeats sync. “Baby,” he says, “Baby, you’re so good for me.” Keith’s so done for.

And it ends like this: they won’t stop saying _pilot error_ and they made him into a question on tests and a run in the sim chamber and still they won’t stop saying _pilot error_. In his voicemail there’s a message, “I know you turned your phone off for the launch. But I want you to know I love you, baby, and I’m coming back for you.” If he plays it enough maybe it will drown out the news reports. Keith wears Shiro’s shirts until they stop smelling like him. It’s still not enough. It’s never going to be enough again.

(It starts again like this: Shiro’s on his bed, heavily scarred and muscled, with an arm that’s sleekly mechanical and cool to the touch. Keith curls into his side and inhales a smell that’s space and metal but still Shiro. Other people’s snores come through the thin door that separates his bedroom from the main living area. Keith doesn’t even mind because it covers the sound of his crying. Then Shiro’s turning, awake now, to pull Keith into him so close that their heartbeats sync. “Hey,” he says, “Hey. I came back.” Keith closes his eyes and shudders through the tears. Red stains his cheeks again as he whispers back, “Call me your baby?” because he’s never asked before but he needs, he needs, he needs. Shiro’s hands tighten on him almost to bruising. “Shh, baby, shh. I’m here. And I’ll always come back for my baby.”)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by an [ask](https://akaiikowrites.tumblr.com/post/167056189028/keith-likes-to-draw-which-means-somewhere-in-his) arahir answered.

Keith sketches on napkins and old receipts and the margins of his notebooks. It’s something he picks up in the roadside diners while his father hustles the pool table to pay for their next tank of gas or night at the motel. The waitresses are always worn at the edges, with hard lines framing their red mouths, but they give him crayons with a gentle sigh in the back of their throat.

Drawing isn’t a useful skill. Keith’s hands can do so many things, though. They can fix machines and throw knives and pick pockets and navigate speeders. A man’s hands, his father says, because they are lined with engine grease and fighter’s calluses and desert sand by the time he is eleven. When he is twelve, he adds charcoal dust to the lines of his hand and his father’s mouth hardens into something both angry and sad. But Keith’s hands can do so many things, all of them hard, and he wants to keep this one soft thing.

The Garrison gives him a stipend and he spends that first check on art supplies. He buys a sketchbook he doesn’t dare to touch. It’s pristine, with crisp edges, and he will ruin it. At the Garrison, the things he sketches are memories he didn’t think he’d miss:

roadsides diners, kind waitresses with red lips, scrapped cars, lizards sunning themselves on cacti, pool tables, lonely gas stations, the arc of the texas sky, his father

None of these come out right. Frustration gnaws at him. Paper crumples under his hand. But then he unclenches his fist and smooths it back out, because he needs those notes from Advanced Navigation. Maybe the fault lies in his memory. Or maybe he’s just learned that you can only draw hard things as soft for so long before you realize the lie.

The Garrison only cares that his hands are pilot’s hands, engineer’s hands, _soldier’s_ hands. They do not miss his artist’s hands.

Four months later he’s  in the flight sim watching old runs by better pilots (there’s only one) when his fingers itch for a pencil. Iverson gives him a dubious look when he gets out of the flight sim with smudged fingers and messy sketches and the wild, certain look in his eye that always means he’s about to do something more brave than smart. But they don’t care about his artist’s hands and so they only see how his scores climb with each passing week as he throws himself into this new mania.

Keith ruins his sketchbook for Shiro.

Pages steadily fill with Shiro’s sim runs, and then Shiro’s polite smiles with a hint of warmth behind the eyes and Shiro’s form as he works through training katas in the gym, and then Shiro’s laugh, Shiro’s eyeroll, Shiro’s grin right before he scares the piss out of Matt. In quiet moments he can chart how their relationship deepens by how close the sketches get. They start so far away, just a ship arcing through digital space, but they end so close, Shiro’s hands on the controls with chiaroscuro lovingly clinging to his bony knuckles and strong fingers. From somewhere around Christmas there are two sketches of Shiro sleeping, because neither of them had families to go home to, and Shiro invited him to sleep over on Christmas Eve. Keith meant to draw more, there’s a half started third sketch, but then Shiro woke up and reached for him drowsily and he went gladly.

Ruination is punctuated the day of the Kerberos launch. Two pages from the end of the sketchbook he does a quick piece of the two of them, at the launch site, arms around each other. Shiro watches him do it and his voice is so soft as he asks, “Can I…?” Keith rips the page out and gives it to him.

In a shack in the middle of the desert, Keith has a sketchbook full of Shiro but no pictures.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Story [request](https://akaiikowrites.tumblr.com/post/167107823578/oooh-helloooo-this-is-a-fic-prompt-for-sheith) from paleesky.

“What. Are you doing. With. The _baby_.” Keith enunciates each word with the kind of precision he usually reserves for commanding an attack on a Galra base. After the world’s awkwardest pause, he reaches up to pinch the bridge of his nose as he corrects himself, “To. _To_ the baby.”

Shiro’s near the kitchen table; or what passes for it in the Castle of Lions. Very slowly, his head turns until he makes vaguely horrified eye contact with Keith. “Keith, you’re…” A pause. “You’re here.”

With monumental self control, Keith says, “I am. And you’re holding the baby in the air. _Why_.”

The thing is, Keith doesn’t actually need an answer. Before he’d turned the corner into the kitchen he’d known, on a deep intrinsic level, exactly what he would see. The cheerfully mangled attempt at the opening to the Circle of Life could only mean one thing. The other thing is, Shiro knows that Keith doesn’t actually need an answer.

Very carefully, Shiro lowers the baby and tucks her into his chest. Despite her recently being held aloft, and the sleepless night that preceded this morning, she’s in a rare good mood. Burbling loudly, gripping one of Shiro’s metal fingers in her own clawed fist, and flicking her overlarge ears in the particular way that suggests contentment. Anger seeps out of Keith like water through his fingers because seeing this small Galran baby cradled in Shiro’s muscled arms means something. It feels like glimpsing _home_ after months in occupied territory.

Maybe it shows on his face. It must. Shiro moves the baby entirely into his Galran arm and holds out his human one for Keith. Less than a heartbeat later Keith’s tucked against Shiro’s chest too. All of them cradled together.

Unable to help himself, Keith strokes one of his fingers down the baby’s downy soft cheek. She turns into his touch with a coo. They don’t know how old she is, exactly, but she knows a few half words in Galran and the one she babbles through for Keith is some variation on _lifegiver_. Keith doesn’t coo back. But he smiles, and strokes her cheek again, and says, “We need to give her a name.”

“That’s why I was holding her,” Shiro says. This close, Keith can feel the words as they rumble in his chest. “I thought maybe a good name would come to me.”

If he could, Keith would side eye the hell out of Shiro. Fuck that. He does side eye the hell out of Shiro because no one throws shade like a Keith Kogane throws shade because a Keith Kogane shade don’t stop for petty things like acknowledgement or physics. It does, apparently, stop for babies who start to make breathy wails.

Attention back on the baby, Keith reaches up to rub at her ears. The first few times he’d done it everyone scolded him that she wasn’t a dog. But he was the part Galran, and it seemed like a good idea, and it always made the baby calm down again. “So, names?”

Shiro’s hand on his hip tightens for a moment. He clears his throat, but his voice is still hoarse when he says, “I thought maybe Kei?” Keith makes a noncommittal hum. Shiro goes on. “It means lucky.” That makes Keith pause, because she is lucky. Lucky they found her floating in an escape pod after the Empire destroyed a Marmora base. Lucky they fought it out with Allura to keep her. And maybe, they’re lucky too.

“I like Kei.” One of her ears twitches, independent of the other, and it’s the oddest thing. Keith pulls her into his arms. The way she settles there, warm and heavy, anchors him down in a way nothing before Shiro ever could. “It’s a good name.”

Arms freed up, Shiro wraps them both around Keith’s waist in a tight, possessive hold. His chin hooks over Keith’s shoulder as he looks down at the baby. At _their_ baby.

Kei blinks her golden eyes up at them and opens her mouth in a wide yawn. It’s instinct to rock her, swaying in place, voice rising in a soothing hum. Shiro moves with him. It’s almost a dance. The corner of Keith’s mouth kicks up into a half smile as he starts to sing. By the time he’s on the second line it’s just loud enough to be heard and Shiro’s arms tighten again as he joins in. “—but the sun rolling high, through the sapphire sky, keeps great and small on the endless round—”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by goodtohaveyouback's beautiful [edit](https://akaiikowrites.tumblr.com/post/167141143343/goodtohaveyouback-kiss-in-the-dark-twitter).

They tell him his name is Shiro. (He is twenty-five. He is from Earth. He is a Paladin of Voltron.) They tell him he will not feel anything for the other Paladins. (His hair is bone white from experimentation. His face is scarred. His hands are drenched in blood.) They tell him his mission is critical. (He is a champion. He is a survivor. He is a weapon.) They tell him he will not fail.

But they don’t tell him that Keith Kogane has eyes the exact indigo of the space between the stars.

“You’re not him,” Keith snarls. Hands clench into fists at his sides but he hasn’t gone for his knife or his bayard yet. They are alone in a corridor of the east wing of the Castle of Lions.

Shiro opens his mouth. Follow the training. Claim that he is the man he looks like, sounds like, can’t quite act like.

Keith stalks closer. Blue lamps cast their glow over his face and highlight its sharp angles. Altean colors don’t suit him. Someone like him is meant to be bathed in gold. Shiro doesn’t have poetry in him anymore. Maybe he never had any poetry at all. If he did it’s all been burned out by quintessence. Keith makes him miss poetry through. Because Keith is fierce, a creature formed of nebula dust and mythic fury, untouchable.

“You’re not _him_ ,” Keith says again. It takes a moment for Shiro to realize that what softens Keith’s voice is not doubt but desperation. Hope gleams in Keith’s eyes like he still wants to believe—against every reason and instinct—that he’s wrong. All it will take is a word.

Training presses blade sharp against the edges of his consciousness. His mouth tastes like rust and electricity. Deny. Convince. _Lie_.

Instead Shiro pushes forward and cups Keith’s jaw with his hands. One of Keith’s fists thump against his chest without any real malice. It takes seconds to crowd the smaller male against the wall. Those eyes, so beautiful that they mute the pain of going against training, glitter up at him. Challenge, like the fist still pressed into his chest.

Nothing to do but answer. Shiro leans down and presses a hot, open mouthed kiss against Keith’s lips. A staggering heartbeat passes before Keith responds. Slow at first. Like they’re learning each other all over again. (This is what it feels like to learn someone. Fuck, it’s so good.) Teeth bite at Shiro’s lower lip. Somehow they surge into each other and tangle up until Keith’s rutting his half-hard cock against Shiro’s hip and Shiro’s got his Galran hand in a bruising grip on the back of Keith’s neck. It’s not sweet. They will never _be_ sweet. (But maybe he can learn to be sweet for Keith. Fuck, he wants to learn.)

Minutes or hours later they break apart. Keith, lips swollen red and wet, cluthing at him with desperate hands. Shiro, muscles shaking with restraint, whispering like a promise or a prayer, “I still love you. I still love you. _I still love you._ ”

Here’s the thing he will tell them if they ever ask: it doesn’t matter how many times they recreate Takashi Shirogane. There will never be an incarnation of him that doesn’t love this impossible boy. In any universe those eyes, the exact indigo of the space between stars, will call him home.


End file.
